Free A Spy in the House of Love by Anaïs Nin

another adolescent
stunted comment. His appearance of maturity was belied by the clumsy words. So
she said vaguely: “I’m homesick for all the beach towns I have known, Capri,
Mallorca, the south of France, Venice, the Italian Riviera, South America. “
    “I understand that,” he said. “I was homesick
when I first came to this country from Ireland.”
    “A year ago I was dancing on the beach under
palm trees. The music was wild, and the waves washed our feet while we danced.”
    “Yes, I know. I was a bodyguard for a rich man.
Everybody sat in the port cafes at night. It was like the Fourth of July every
night. Come along, I’ll take you to my home. The wife and kids are asleep, but
I can give you some aspirin.”
    She sat beside him. He continued to recall his
life as a bodyguard, when he had traveled all around the world. He controlled
the car without a dissonance.
    “I hate this town,” she said vehemently.
    He had driven smoothly beside a neat white
house. He said: “Wait here,” and went into the house.
    When he returned he was carrying a glass of
water and two aspirin in the palm of his hand. Sabina’s nerves began to
untangle. She took the water and aspirin obediently.
    He turned his powerful flashlight upon a bush
in his garden and said: “Look at this!”
    In the night she saw flowers of velvet with
black hearts and gold eyes.
    “What kind of a flower is that?” she asked, to
please him.
    “Roses of Sharon,” he said reverently and with
the purest of Irish accents. “They only grow in Ireland and on Long Island.”
    Sabina’s rebellion was subsiding. She felt a
tenderness for the roses of Sharon, for the policeman’s protectiveness, for his
effort to find a substitute for tropical flowers, a little beauty in the
present night.
    “I’ll sleep now,” she said. “You can drop me
off at the Penny Cottage.”
    “Oh no,” he said, sitting at the wheel. “We’ll
drive around by the sea until you’re so sleepy you can’t bear it anymore. You
can’t sleep, you know, until you find something to be grateful for, you can
never sleep when you’re angry.”
    She could not hear very distinctly his long and
rambling stories about his life as a bodyguard, except when he said: “There’s
two of you giving me trouble with homesickness today. The other was a young
fellow in the English Air Corps. Aviator all through the war, seventeen when he
volunteered. He’s grounded now, and he can’t take it. He’s restless and keeps
speeding and breaking traffic laws. The red lights drive him crazy. When I saw
what it was, I stopped giving him tickets. He’s used to airplanes. Being grounded
is tough. I know how he feels.”
    She felt the mists of sleep rising from the
ground, bearing the perfume of roses of Sharon; in the sky shone the eyes of
the grounded aviator not yet accustomed to small scales, to shrunken spaces.
There were other human beings attempting vast flights, with a kind policeman as
tall as the crusaders watching over them with a glass of water and two
aspirins; she could sleep now, she could sleep, she could find her bed with his
flashlight shining on the keyhole, his car so smoothly so gently rolling away,
his white hair saying sleep…
    Sabina in the telephone booth. Alan had just
said that he was unable to come that day. Sabina felt like sliding down on the
floor and sobbing out the loneliness. She wanted to return to New York but he
begged her to wait.
    There were places which were like ancient tombs
in which a day was a century of non-existence. He had said: “Surely you can
wait another day. I’ll be there tomorrow. Don’t be unreasonable. “
    She could not explain that perfect lawns,
costly churches, new cement and fresh paint can make a vast tomb without stone
gods to admire, without jewels, or urns full of food for the dead, without
hieroglyphs to decipher.
    Telephone wires only carried literal messages,
never the subterranean cries of distress, of desperation. Like telegrams